Civilization as an Aesthetic Concept
The “Standard of Civilization” Reconsidered
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6146945 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Martina Zago (0009-0009-6039-2089, University of British Columbia, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Publication date | 2025-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Global Studies Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2634-3797 • E-ISSN: 2634-3797 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/isagsq/ksaf045 |
| OpenAlex | W4411009782 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 54 |
Civilization, I argue, is an aesthetic concept, not just a legal and political one. To make this case, I take as an illustration the nineteenth-century “standard of civilization,” which ranked peoples and countries into “civilized,” “barbarous,” and “savage,” specifying the requirements aspiring outsiders had to fulfill to enter the “charmed circle of civilization.” I show that “the standard” was fundamentally informed by historical judgments of taste; it functioned not so much according to an explicit set of legal-political criteria but to Orientalist cultural discourses of landscape (danger, paradise, and neglect) and identity (violence, sensuality, and subservience), which I relate to a visual archive of paintings of the time. If civilization is understood in primarily aesthetic terms, focusing on international legal texts provides only a partial explanation of the concept’s use. I suggest artists and artworks, as historically significant sources of cultural discourse, disclose what the law did not say, or dare say explicitly, about civilization and hence should be more central to analysis
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Civilization · Epistemology · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · Global Security and Public Health · International Relations and Foreign Policy · History · Philosophy
Legal Orientalism
Something to do with States
The Discourse of Civilization and Pan-Asianism
Distinction
Aesthetics and World Politics
The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia
Defacing Power
Europe’s Myths of Orient
Mapping visual global politics
The Empire of Civilization
Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems
Hollyworld
Liberalism and Empire
Shape shifting
Civilizationism and the Ideological Contestation of the Liberal International Order
Contrapuntal Reading” as a Method, an Ethos, and a Metaphor for Global IR
The Myth of the “Civilization State”
The ‘Standard of Civilisation’ as an English School Concept
National and Post-National Performances at the Venice Biennale
The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory
Introduction
The Standard of ‘Civilisation’, the Expansion Thesis and the 19th-century International Social Space
Introduction
Images of international thinkers
The Panic of the Visual
Civilization as a concept in foreign policy
Introduction India as a ‘civilizational state’
Orientalism’s Interlocutors
Empire and International Relations in Victorian Political Thought
The reality and power of international law
The importance of being civilized
Art World Fields and Global Hegemonies
International Relations in the Age of the Image
Ruptures in Depiction—Recognition and Political Cartoons of Putin
The Status of Women as a Standard of ‘Civilization
Representing civilization
Saving civilization from empire
Theorizing the image for Security Studies
The Visual Turn in IR
A Turn to Empire
Reading comics for the field of International Relations
Culture and Imperialism
The Return of Civilization-and of Arnold Toynbee
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |